engiffen

Generates gifs from image sequences.

Source frame, generated gif, and a gif from Photoshop

usage

as binary

# Read a bunch of bitmaps and write them to a 20-frame-per-second gif at path `hello.gif`
engiffen *.bmp -f 20 -o hello.gif

# Read a range of files
engiffen -r file01.bmp file20.bmp -o hello.gif
# The app sorts them in lexicographical order, so if your shell orders `file9`
# before `file10`, the resulting gif will not be in that order.

# Use a faster but worse quality algorithm
engiffen -r file01.bmp file20.bmp -o hello.gif -q naive

# Use the default NeuQuant algorithm, but with a reduced pixel sample rate
# Values over 1 reduces the amount of pixels the algorithm trains with
engiffen -r file01.bmp file100.bmp -o hello.gif -s 2

# Print to stdout by leaving out the -o argument
engiffen *.bmp > output.gif
# or hose your console by forgetting to redirect!
engiffen *.bmp

(If your shell doesn't expand glob patterns into individual args (for instance, the Windows commandline), the binary will parse a single argument as a glob pattern and expand it into file names on its own. You can install the binary with --no-default-features to skip this feature.)

as library

extern crate engiffen;

use engiffen::{load_images, engiffen, Gif, Quantizer};
use std::fs::File;

let paths = vec!["vector", "of", "file", "paths", "on", "disk"];
let images = load_images(&paths);
let mut output = File::create("output.gif")?;

// encode an animated gif at 10 frames per second
let gif = engiffen(&images, 10, Quantizer::Naive)?;
gif.write(&mut output);

// Optionally specify how many pixels of each frame should be sampled
// when computing the gif's palette. This value reduces the amount of
// sampling work to 1/9th of what it normally would, by only sampling
// every 3rd pixel on every 3rd row (i.e. pixels lying on a 3x3 grid).
let gif = engiffen(&images, 10, Quantizer::NeuQuant(3));

debug output

To print timing info to STDERR, compile with the debug-stderr feature

$ cargo install engiffen --features debug-stderr

$ engiffen *.tif -f 15 -s 10 > out.gif
Checked image dimensions in 0 ms.
Pushed all frame pixels in 469 ms.
Computed palette in 67 ms.
Mapped pixels to palette in 3443 ms.
Wrote to stdout in 5415 ms

misc

Tests that actually create gifs from sample frames are ignored. When running the ignored specs, run in release mode or they'll take forever.

cargo test --release -- --ignored

Major work to do

• Incremental frame processing

  Accept a stream of frames from a server to process individually as they arrive. Put off sorting the final palette and compiling the gif until finished.

Anything else?